Friday, April 30, 2010

Wisteria

We have a lovely native wisteria, Wisteria americana, which is much more well-behaved than its Asian cousin.

Chinese Wisteria, although fragrant and lovely, is rampant and invasive, when not carefully confined on an arbor or fence. It's a memory plant for me; when my sister and I took piano lessons through our teens (she's now a music teacher and musician), we alternated being at the library, which was just down the street from a tremendous wisteria vine, filled with fragrance in the spring.

Wisteria sinesis, now, is a nemesis, something that we remove from strangling native trees and shrubs, and other plantings.

So I was quick to recognize and root out these wisteria seedlings--volunteers from some delivered mulch.

It may have been a single pod full of seeds, as they were all near each other!

Yikes, a vine that not only spreads through underground rhizomes, but also through seeds. No wonder it's so 'successful'!

About this blog

My blog posts span two gardens over the last decade, one in the Piedmont of South Carolina and the other in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Our gardens have been increasingly home to native plants, birds, small mammals, and insects of all sorts. My gardening companion (my husband) is equally the gardener.

Woody, our rescue Golden, is now our fellow gardener, now solely in the mountains of Western North Carolina. He follows his previous fellow goldens (and my former gardening assistants): Mocha and Chessie. They bring life to our gardens.